A Flower-Shaped Thermal Energy Harvester Made by Metamaterials

Harvesting thermal energy from arbitrary directions has become an exciting theoretical possibility. However, an exact 3D thermal energy harvester is still challenging to achieve for the stringent requirement of highly anisotropic and symmetrical structures with homogenous materials, as well as absence of effective characterization. In this Communication, a flower-shaped thermal harvesting metamaterial is originally promoted. Numerical simulations imply that heat flux can be concentrated into the target core and a temperature gradient turns out to be more than two times larger than the applied one without obvious distortion or perturbation to the temperature profile outside the concentrator. Temperature transitions of the actual device are experimentally measured to validate the novel structure with consistency of the simulated results with original methods. With ultraefficiency independent of geometrical size, the flower-shaped thermal harvester facilitates multiple scale energy harvesting with splendid efficient and might help to improve thermoelectric devices efficiency in a totally new perspective.